Gerry Hemingway, Drummer, More than 13 Ways

A first thing to notice with Gerry Hemingway is his smoothly reserved body
language and the inquisitive way he can tilt his head. Sharply focused
intelligence becomes obvious when one is close enough to observe his bright,
penetrating eyes. His speech tones are of lower timbre and the velocity of
words measured. In conversation his ideas are enunciated with architectural
authority: his thinking on a given topic may range far afield but he always
comes back, musician-like, to the one.

Although he eats heartily, his clothes drape loosely on him. He is clearly
in
good physical shape and it is difficult to decide if his slender frame is
the
result of a fast metabolism, the physical work he puts into drumming and
road
tours, or the mental effort required to collate a commanding knowledge of
affairs musical, literary, philosophical and social, of business, politics
and public education.

His ability to incisively and analytically think through a musical strategy
is demonstrated when he discusses his duo concert last May with American
pianist Cecil Taylor at Der Singel in Belgium. Hemingway explains that in
Taylor's drum-piano duos (specifically mentioning a collaboration with Max
Roach) he has noticed Taylor and his co-musician doing what each does best
but not necessarily playing off each other's ideas and directly interacting.
"I hear these concerts as a coexistence of ideas; some interesting things
happen from these juxtapositions. But that is not the kind of player I am.
I'm a listener, always inside and sensitive to whatever else is in the audio
field."

Perhaps some musicians go their own direction because they cannot unite
with,
understand, or bend the will of the shamanistic Taylor. Or perhaps they just
cannot keep up with the dynamics of Taylor's aggressive thought process.
Hemingway, on the other hand, actively sought to explore an aspect of
Taylor's music, his sense of dance. "Cecil has spent a great deal of his
life
around professional ballet dancers. I always felt his phrasing has a real
sense of how a dancer moves through space. The beginnings and ends of
phrases
have these special nuances, flourishes, and ways of coming to a point that
are particular to the way ballet is often constructed. So I wanted to make a
connection with that kind of phrasing.

"I think it happened, even more than I expected. I found myself playing a
lot
more marimba and vibraphone that I thought I would. The music we produced
was
far more transparent than I expected. There were periods of great density
and
energy, but I relished the moments when there was actual harmonic interplay
and a sense of playfulness in reacting to each other."

Hemingway's reference to "harmonic interplay" is bang on. Taylor, of course,
is renowned for his ability to relentlessly percuss the pianoforte (in this
case a Bosendorfer with an extra half-octave at the bass-end) and make the
instrument ring. By stressing the marimba and vibraphone, Hemingway
incandesced his own sound. He thereby made a music that came to harmonic
terms with Taylor's aggressive piano-resonance. More importantly,
Hemingway's attack enhanced the overall musicality of the event. It was
especially when Hemingway introduced instruments whose sound decays less
rapidly than drum heads that one could feel Taylor concede his relentless
momentum. The dancing-musicians seemed to lock eyes, change their sense of
time, and launch themselves -- together -- through space.

Hemingway is, of course, no stranger to the challenging affairs of
improvisation. He spent many years in the crucible of Anthony Braxton's
music, his pianistic partner the formidably percussive Marilyn Crispell. At
the 1999 duMaurier International Jazz Festival Vancouver, he teamed up with
bassist William Parker and pianist Paul Plimley for a one-off improvisation
that was a delight of the festival. He also has a longstanding improvisory
association with pianist Georg Graewe and cellist Ernst Reijseger.

But Hemingway does not by any means confine himself to the work of
spontaneous improvisation. His discography demonstrates a diversity of
output, the staples of his road and recording work being his quartet, the
quintet and the collective trio BassDrumBone (with Mark Helias and Ray
Anderson). Then there are the oddball self-assignments like solo and chamber
works, and the enigmatic Thirteen Ways.

Thirteen Ways is Fred Hersch on piano, Michael Moore on reeds and Hemingway.
Like many of his musical associations, Hemingway's recent collaboration with
Hersch and Moore has friendship and musical roots from his New Haven days
(1972-79). The name of the group refers to the Wallace Stevens poem
"Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The group is not a regularly traveling
group, having appeared once at New York's Knitting Factory when their album
was recorded in 1995. They played two concerts at the Vancouver festival
this
year, leaving listeners craving for more. Thirteen Ways' Focus was
released last January by Palmetto Records.

Thirteen Ways plays a music that is spare, romantic and beautiful, rare
phenomena in art today. The touch of hands and blow of breath is light and
subtle. It is a music that focuses the inner vision to sharpness, compels
the
ear adjust to intervals of nuance and silence. It impels the listener to
breathe softly. The title track is a series of solos, duos, and trios, each
section abstract and allusive.

Hemingway's self description of "being sensitive to whatever else is in the
audio field" can easily be put to the test in the low intensity atmosphere
of
the sounds of a bird's wings, a sun-filled back-country town in Portugal,
and
the Hemingway-Moore duet, "Steel and Clarinet." Hemingway is no bawd to
euphony but listen to on the title track to his own Wallace-like inflections
and innuendoes, each as mysterious and elusive as a Japanese haiku.
Hemingway's quintet and quartet, on the other hand, are often high intensity
affairs. The drums and other percussion instruments are heard in the context
of the complex and blowing sonic field surrounding them. He is certainly as
schooled in percussion technique as anyone in jazz and improvised music,
often felt more than heard among the maelstrom of sounds produced by Wolter
Wierbos or Robin Eubanks, Ernst Reijseger, Michael Moore or Ellery Eskelin,
and Mark Dresser. Anyone who has seen Hemingway playing knows he has a
distinctive percussion style. But what are the qualities of his distinctive
sound and how to get at them through the listening process?

Listening to Thirteen Ways and the Quintet suggest that Hemingway's
instrumental attack is kin to chapter changes, paragraph indentations and
punctuation that signalize coherence within a literary piece. Hemingway is
often photographed in concert with his sticks frozen in mid-air. Be assured,
Hemingway is not doing this so photographers can get a clean shot. He is not
a perpetual motion drummer; blurring sticks through ferocious attack is not
the market from which he draws his entire stock.

The period between strokes can be as important to rendering of the music as
the intensity, placement and velocity of the strokes. Hemingway tends to
percuss with well-defined strokes, skipping a beat and stroking again with
different intensity in an off-meter way. He also tends to color his way
across cymbals with tangent slashes of the brushes. Perhaps most
importantly,
he tends to house his statements on one section of the kit at a time. This
kind of sectioning breaks up the rhythm function that resides within every
drummer, and allows him to state musical themes. He also surrounds himself
with an array of other sound-makers, like Caribbean pan or glockenspiel to
subtlety to color compositions.

(For a different take on his drumming listen to him power -- in straight
time
-- the Anthony Braxton Quartet's version of John Coltrane's "Impressions,"
closing out their 1992 Victoriaville, Quebec concert. Or try his polyphonic
solo during "On It" on his 1998 CD Johnny's Corner Song).

The literary allusion to Hemingway's instrumental technique also provides a
gateway to both his compositional and improvisational mind-set. During a
June
1999 interview in Vancouver, Canada, he stated:

"As an improviser, I'm generally speaking a formalist. If you want to
characterize my work, I'm generally interested in forms, like sculpture,
that
make sense from top to bottom. I'm interested in how forms work in space, in
the elegance of how they flow from one end to the other, in the three
dimensional aspect, of how you can see backwards and forwards in a piece,
that there is a reason to be at C just as there is a reason to be at A and
B.

"And at the same time, like the layering that occurs in literature, I'm
interested in multiple layering in music, for different things to happen at
different times. All those compositional things just mentioned I bring into
my work in an open improvising situation. I'm looking at the same issues,
just in real time. Even if others are less thinking along those lines, the
way I work it tends to steer the music in that direction, just by virtue of
that's who I am. It is clear to me when I look at my work, that my
syntheses of these elements has clarified over the years. And that is how it
should be: the growth after the poverty is called maturity."

Hemingway"s boldest composition may be the 1995 "Perfect World," a musical
outcome of what he has described in an interview with Keith McMullen as "an
appetite for the unimaginable." The 22-minute piece begins with a violent
arco cascade by Mark Dresser lasting some eight seconds. After a five second
silence, he repeats the cascade but doubles the length, then takes a period
of silence and goes at it again.

He builds the solo around a series of ascending lines. At the end of each of
these lines, he dramatically plunges from the high end into the low end of
the instrument's range. Dresser's attack allows him to express the
instrument
simultaneously in the nominal range of the cello and bass. The solo is dark
and foreboding, each cycle ending with presentiment that a cataclysm is
approaching. The time feel within each "micro-groove" (to use French
composer
Benont Delbecq's expression) of Dresser's solo is one of acceleration, ended
abruptly with a slash. As the pulse builds, one feels an increasing
nervosity
and the listener may well ask when deliverance into a world of tranquility
will arrive.

Release of tension never close in Gerry Hemingway's perfect world; when at
three minutes into the Dresser solo the band enters, the suspense is torqued
that much tauter by framing Dresser's compelling momentum with alternating
and accelerating vamps from Wolter Wierbos (trombone) and Michael Moore
(bass
clarinet). Wierbos and Moore are not even close to playing harmoniously or
in
time with each other. Hemingway's entrance at the same time adds to the edge
as he pushes the rhythm.

And then as if by magic, the elements of stabilization become heard at the
end of the fourth minute. Hemingway's beat starts to become steady, the bass
pulls its way out of the maelstrom and at 5:51 Michael Moore and Ernst
Reijseger (cello) play a voiced, repetitive groove used as a transitory
device leading into, at minute eight, Wolter Wierbos' solo. The tension then
begins to rise again. The song follows this pattern of long periods of
high-voltage as each musician gets blowing space. "Perfect World" ends with
Hemingway's denouement drum solo, a train you wouldn't want to stand in the
way of.

"Perfect World" is remarkable for its ability to sustain and increase
tension
over long periods of time. Hemingway uses several compositional devices to
enhance the suspense and these include acceleration and deceleration of
rhythm, the simultaneous playing of different rhythms and pulses, and having
each musician free to float and modulate among the various tempi. The
elastic
pallette of the sound field keeps the listener off balance, rarely capable
of
finding the point of equilibrium. Hemingway's perfect world seems to be a
plastic, asymmetric, and turbulent place.

Where the composition "Perfect World" seems to be a musical result of
hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, the Visiting Tank (1999 CD,
Chamber Works) is a musical commentary on the effects of that perverse human
invention, war, on children. In our Vancouver interview, Gerry Hemingway
spent a considerable amount of time elaborating on this new work. It was
clearly very important to him, not only because he had just finished
recording, but because he is a father who thinks a lot about children. Here
are some excerpts from the conversation:

"I had imagery in mind, a sense of place, content and feeling dealing with
the dichotomy of children and war. The notion was that there was a tank in a
playground and the kids were playing on it as if it were a jungle gym,
exploring their childhood, right in the physical context of this machinery
of
hatred and destruction. I imagined what it must be like to be in that
environment, imagined the real images of real wars, the reality of children
having to survive wars.

"I combined my own dreamlike kind of sonic imagery with writing for a string
quartet to convey sounds that might draw us into such an atmosphere. I used
different sounds that I thought gave it a sense of place, like a clock
ticking the passage of time; or the sounds of not knowing, like the
tick-tock
of a time bomb. You know the tick-tock when it goes through the speakers,
but
the pitch is changing all the time, it floats around in the atmosphere of
sound and is processed in different ways. The sounds of people screaming are
there, although you might not recognize it as such. There is a sense of
terror, as in a dream; it's not real and you can't touch it.

"That's the wonderful thing about electronics. You have this chance to be
poetic with sound. If you are handy with this machinery, you can convey some
pretty interesting things. In "The Visiting Tank" I used associative sound
work, which is common with sampling, but I was using associations which were
semi-literal. I did pick things that sort of resemble wartime atmosphere in
a
literal sense, but the sounds were transformed so much that they don't hit
you over the head, like dropping bombs. I wasn't going for the obvious
relationships."

The composition is spooky, placing one in a twilight zone of uncertainty in
one section; suggesting kid-stuff on monkey bars in another; military
officiousness in a third, and with desperate sadness throughout. The music
was written during a difficult period of his personal life. He said, "I've
got a wide pallette of interests, and I found my writing for the string
quartet ended up being a bit like my writing for the quintet. There wasn't a
big division between the work with improvisors and non-improvisors. In fact
the musical results resemble each other, which tells me that in my work
there
is some consistent thread that I'm interested in as a writer. To me the
string
quartet captures my life inside and hopefully it is compelling enough to
others that it offers some insight."

Hemingway recently moved his residence, one of the reasons being to ensure
his son was in a school district where children could have access to arts
education. He is a man filled with a deep humanitarianism and understanding
of the human condition. He surrounds himself with some of the most important
musicians of North America and Europe. The "Chamber Works" are just one
example of the projects that he has been thinking on for years, but "I won't
write a stick of music until I have the gig, recording, or whatever." He has
one of the more impressive and wide-ranging discographies of contemporary
American composers, yet it is next to impossible to find his CDs, even in
major record stores. Better to buy direct from his web-site or at his gigs
than wait to put your money in a retailer. He tours more regularly in Europe
than in his homeland. And yet he does not desist from creating serious
works.

Hemingway has been asked many times about his relationship to the music
of Anthony Braxton. In his interview with Keith McMullen, he replied to a
question about this influence by saying, "He gave assurance that my
obsession with music has a human basis, and serves a vital purpose in
sustaining life with meaning on this planet." In Hemingway's music one finds
beauty, violence, struggle for existence, the poetry of abstraction, and the
highest order of musicianship. Hemingway may not live in a perfect world,
but he does have a "Perfect World" of his own.

Laurence Svirchev is a Vancouver, Canada writer and photographer
specializing in contemporary music and dance arts. His latest project was
covering the Munich, Germany "Come Sunday" and travelling with the Georg
Graewe Octet to Austria and Croatia.